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LANGUAGE IS
A SOCIAL ART
WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE (1908–2000)
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of languageAPPROACH
Analytic philosophyBEFORE
c.400 BCE Plato’s Cratylus
investigates the relationship
between words and things.19th century Søren
Kierkegaard stresses the
importance of the study of
language for philosophy.1950s Ludwig Wittgenstein
writes that there is no such
thing as a private language.AFTER
1980s Richard Rorty suggests
that knowledge is more like
“conversation” than the
representation of reality.1990s In Consciousness
Explained, Quine’s former
student Daniel Dennett says
that both meaning and inner
experience can only be
understood as social acts.S
ome philosophers assert
that language is about the
relationship between words
and things. Quine, however,
disagrees. Language is not about
the relationship between objects
and verbal signifiers, but about
knowing what to say and when to
say it. It is, he says in his 1968 essay
Ontological Relativity, a social art.
Quine suggests the following
thought experiment. Imagine that
we come across some people—
perhaps natives of another country—
who speak a language we do not
share. We are sitting with a groupof these people when a rabbit
appears, and one of the natives
says “gavagai.” We wonder if there
can be a connection between the
event—the appearance of the
rabbit—and the fact that the native
says “gavagai.” As time goes on,
we note that every time a rabbit
appears, somebody says “gavagai”,
so we conclude that “gavagai” can
be reliably translated as rabbit.
But, Quine insists, we are wrong.
“Gavagai” could mean all manner
of things. It could mean “oh, look,
dinner!” for example, or it could
mean “behold, a fluffy creature!”Words are
meaningful to us......because we become used
to the ways in which they
are used by others......not because there is
a link between words
and actual things.Language is
a social art.The way that language
is used socially
makes it meaningful.